"Together as in other snow times, drinking busthead 'round the fire"—WHAT ARE YOU READING WINTER 2013???

Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

this book is really good. I have no idea how much of it is "true", but the prose is lovely even in translation, and Genet's own unreliability is a kind of artistic triumph...

Still on David Byrne's How Music Works. It's very good. His prose is unfussy and his subject fascinating, which is a winning combination.

tom mccarthy, "remainder"

t Ismael: how exactly would you characterize "his subject"? I've heard good things about the book, but am curious to know the balance of anecdote vs. original theorizing vs. popularization of others' ideas

Reading Malaparte's Kaputt about thirty pages at a time because it would be a little overwhelming in larger chunks. So much incredible imagery.

xp it's pretty much a balance of the three so far (about 2/3rds of the way through). A lot is how music has evolved in response to the prevailing technology, some of which ILM is very familiar with (recording studios, vinyl running length, mp3s), others less so (amplification, physical size of venue), and others I'd never even contemplated (capacity to improvise, concept of live vs recorded work and which is definitive). Then there's a lot on his own creative processes, which I found especially interesting even though a lot is dealing with collaborations and solo work that I've never heard. The next chapter is on finance, I expect that'll be different entirely. I recommend it if the subject is of interest, I can't imagine anyone hating it.

One thing that jumped out from an ILM perspective is that a short section on mp3s and compression is entitled 'crappy sound forever'. I wonder if our own Scik Mouthy is a source work?

I am making a second attempt at Douglas Hofstadter's Godel Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.

Yes, I say second attempt as if this is mountain-climbing or something, but honestly, I have never read a book which makes reading feel like such a climb. I'm trying to read it in stages, a chapter a day, with breaks to go and read something else (an actual book about mountain climbing right now) because I think what did for my last attempt (where I got halfway through) was the sheer bulk and density of it, and wanting to just go off and read something else, and never came back.

I don't know why this book is such a chore - perhaps it's his annoying habit of throwing a theorem at you and saying "see if you can prove it, haha!" as if you are expected to go off with a sheet of paper and scribble out the results (I did, the first couple of exercises, then got annoyed at it) when really, at this point of my life, I am not a maths student; I do actually want to be spoonfed and taken through complex subjects line by line instead of having to work it out myself.

I'm just kind of boggling at the idea that this was previously a best-seller. Were people that much smarter in the 70s? Or did people just buy it and put it on their shelves? I know it's a well-worn trope with scientific tomes on difficult subjects (I am reminded of the 90s cliche on A Brief History Of Time, where everyone tried to read it, and then would boast at which page they "gave up" - I failed on my first attempt to read that book, but by the time I came back to a second reading, the concepts of that book had percolated through culture widely enough that it didn't feel difficult at all, in fact, I wondered how I had been stupid enough to give it up the first time.) But with GED, it seems even *harder* on the second attempt, like I am understanding this *less* than the first time I tried to read it. (Or perhaps because I was reading it on the bus back then, I didn't realise how much I failed to grasp.)

I may be reading this for some time.

Byrne says he doesn't want to do just another "aging white rocker memoir," so he starts out talking about sound quality in venues and how this goes back and forth with the sound of genres and subgenres; maybe consciously avoiding the "I" word---but then he starts testifying---about recording through the decades, starting with home tapes, ditto with performance, busking through college towns in the late 60s, to CBGBs to discoveries made on stage, touring with dancers especially. But he also goes way back, to the dawn of recorded music, and how it changed listening/listeners, etc. Later: "How To Make A Scene," and the music of the spheres, as chased by scientists and other heavies through the ages---really one of the best books of any kind I've read this century, at least.

His email newsletter is pretty cool: he's got a wide range of interests and enthusiasms, a measuring eye and ear too.

I've picked up his urban cycling memoir too, it looks really neat

I just put a hold on How Music Works at my local library.

In the newsletter he announced the ebook edition ("with some little music files embedded"); not quite embarrassed but def skeptical about ebooks vs. books, re how usable for people of the future, what with formats changing (no Gutenberg Floppy Disk for our white-gloved descendants, apparently)

Gonçalo M. Tavares's _Jerusalem_. This was good. Plain prose and a structure reminiscent of thriller authors, where we follow a bunch of characters towards some plot-nexus, interspersed with a few chapters about past events. There's a hooker and a pistol, too. Lots of philosophizing about sanity and "horror" and fate/teleology. I think I'd like to read more by him, but a title like "Joseph Walser's Machine" puts me off -- same as Villa-Matas, who I haven't read for fear that it's all gonna be ingratiating name-dropping shit cynically written to make the reader feel all cultured and in the know. Then again, _Jerusalem_ had nothing like that.

Read a few chapters of Dino Buzzati's _The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily_. Uh, I didn't realize this was a children's book when I got it at a flea market, and I'm not quite charmed enough to finish it. The doggerel and illustrations are nice though.

Hrm, I suppose structuring a novel like that is pretty common and not really a thriller thing.

Man alive! Sicily's been invaded so many times it's crazy.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2huBqjZPQ_Y/Tp0bpfers3I/AAAAAAAABEk/CQ5VcOON8Kw/s1600/orsi-5.jpg

Turgenev: Smoke

I love him

Picked up this vol of essays/journalism by Bruce Chatwin at a friend's place when I was over there for xmas. There is an interesting piece on Ernst Junger's WWII Diaries, makes a claim for it being "better than anything by Celine or Malaparte". Another piece on Kevin Volans (a composers I really like) that makes a claim about him being "one of the best composers since Stravinsky" which annoys me bcz I wish Stravinsky was as good as Kevin Volans! A lot of this is tied with him meeting these people in the flesh which really gets in the way of seeing the works (with all its flaws and interests) so you get these claims instead.

The piece on Malraux looks laughable already (talks about his "revolutionary" novels which I'd like to think its in the sense in which they talk about revolution but its not going to be that is it?) - does anyone care about Malraux these days? But hey in the middle of this he pays the now minister of culture a visit.

But that's journalism for you.

Has anyone read Songlines?

I read Songlines many years back. It is speculative and quirky. It contains fictional elements which it presents in a factual tone (as did much of Defoe's work, I suppose). It coheres rather loosely and has no particular plot. In sum, I liked it and have no problem recommending it (along with the preceding caveats).

Thanks - will have a look. Went to a show of Aus art recently, a complete incoherent mess but saw some of the Aboriginal paintings, the only bit that intrigued me.

Songlines is half a journal/story about the Outback and the people in it, both the stories of settlers and tales of aboriginal people's - and half a rambling set of quotes and anecdotes about the act of walking itself, and the philosophical / spiritual effects of, some related to the Songlines / Walkabout mythology, some just interesting. It's both frustrating but also amazing. Definitely read it.

Have been pecking at Renata Adler's SPEEDBOAT for six months but only really got into it over this winterlude while in enforced internet exile. Delightfully acerbic, mordant mid70s New York anecdotes/apercus - though a little too pleased with its own cosmo ennui: vampyweeks avant la groupe...

probably gonna continue with Bernhard - Gathering Evidence, part 2.

gaston bachelard - the poetics of space
muriel rukeyser - theory of flight (in the collected poems anthology)

the bears are great. better than his grownup stuff

gass on rilke, the nyrb hofmannsthal stories, michael palin's diaries

Hrm, really now? I'd like to get to The Tartar Steppe some day. I'll probably hang on to The Bears in case I need to babysit a niece or newphew, but I don't think I'll read it just for myself.
I went on to a different sort of children's book,
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham. Loved three of his novels a long time ago. This was ... good? Between the "do you see?" theme-thumping and superspecial teens and the subplot about competing farmer-dads standing in the way of true love, it did give me a whiff of what I imagine a lot of what's called Young Adult novels are like. It made it a bit tiresome. Still, it's a pretty good story which goes at a great pace, and although it gets a bit iffy with the übermensch shit, the message is pretty nice. Could've used more freaky freaks. Not sure to what extent we're supposed to be unnerved by the creepy deus ex machina character. She is certainly not presented as unproblematic, but that seems to get pushed aside at the end. Wish I'd read it when I was fifteen.

The Vet's Daughter by Barbara Comyns. "Autumn came and Mother was still dying in her room." This was wonderful. One of those rare books that make me want to translate it so I can give copies of it to a few people I know. A sad, mostly realistic novel that gets sadder and more fantastical as it goes. This was another one with an asshole dad and some strange mental powers, but much more elegant and artful than The Chrysalids. It tapped into some of the horrors I recall feeling when I saw Pinocchio as a child.

Nostormo - I always wanted to read Gathering Evidence

thomp - How weird I was just looking at an essay by Gass on Rilke (reprinted in my copy of Malte Laurids Brigge) yesterday!

Gass owns

Thomp is that the reading rilke book w gass's own translations?

what's stopping you?

it contains some of his finest writings, because it is very personal, and as a result it's even touching, as much as Bernhard can be.
also, it is sometimes less "technical" which is refreshing after so much Bernhard novels..

xpost

Stephen Kinzer's The Brothers, about Alan and John Foster Dulles, architects of American Cold War policy.

im reading robin wood's "from vietnam to reagan...and beyond" and very very good it is too.

in WH smith's scanning mills & boon blurbs.

Ultimate Italian playboy Count Roman Quisvada has more notches on his bed his bedpost than... well, bedpost!

Also, of course "medical romance" is a sub-genre:

Protected by her ice queen façade, heart surgeon Michelle is always in control. Then maverick anaesthesiologist Ty sweeps in and ruffles her well-groomed feathers!

what's stopping you?

Inter-library loan overload.

Oh, Fizz, if only you'd been woman enough to come to the Girl FAP of yore, in The Foundry's Mills & Boon room. We discussed all this and more.

I read a stackload of M&B when I was staying in a squat in Berlin, and have retained a mild fascination with them ever since - their categories, prose styles, gender types etc all seem slightly strange and subjects worthy of study (tho as far as I know "gender types" is inclusive to an extent unwarranted by the books themselves).

They're so carefully and responsively calibrated to a specific market, that it feels like changes in style, characterisation and moral mechanisms would say an awful lot about a socially significant psyche - almost provide a history of it.

GEB - haven't tackled it for a long time. Don't think I got irritated, do think i didn't really feel smart enough to continue without bullshitting myself, or losing the point of reading. Differs from Brief History of Time I guess in that you have to keep passing through the formulas, as you say, and there's a feeling that you can't really continue if you haven't understood it. BHoT I seem to remember basically allowed you to think of thermodynamics as a cup of tea, so you could continue through to the end even with C- understanding. Popularity of GEB? Early version of brain gymnasium? 'This book will make you cleverer'. Combines lit, music and physics in (as far as I can tell) a genuinely innovative and interesting way (has a touch of the grand unified theory of everything about it perhaps).

His book on translation - Le Ton Beau de Marot - really fucking annoyed me though. Not unstimulating, but v v materialist (bits of Guns, Germs and Steel reminded me of it), which isn't and wasn't to my taste at all, very poor literary sense (which admittedly is my judgment), which, by creating a hierarchy of literary success, ends up narrowing his conception of successful literature or artistic writing (doesn't feel so much my judgment - it's a limiting book I think).

Brother bought me a couple of (amazon wish list) books for Christmas:

The Foundation Pit - Platonov
The Spectre of Alexander Wolf - Gaito Gazdanov

The latter has a great opening paragraph:

Of all my memories, of all my life's innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed. Ever since the moment it happened, I cannot remember one day passing when I haven't regretted it. No punishment for it ever threatened me, because it occurred in the most exceptional of circumstances and it was clear that I couldn't have acted otherwise. Moreover, no one other than I knew about it.

and in fact the hazy, dreamlike chapter that follows is great as well. Very much looking forward to it.

reading Leskov and W Benjamin over Christmas, but want to write at greater length on those later maybe.

Also, JM reminding me that 2014 needs to be the Year of Turgenev. Feeling like overdosing really hard on Russians atm.

What's the rest of the Mills and Boon in Berlin story, again

-

re: Gass: yes, it's 'Reading Rilke'. I find Gass a little bit look-ma-no-hands, though it's made me more interested in reading Rilke than I have been in years. Here's Perloff on Gass on Rilke, which someone sent mme and reminded me I'd not got to the book since I'd bought it:

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/articles/rilke.html

Oh, i was holed up totally skint in East Berlin, 2001, in a squat, with a dog, and about 25-odd M&Bs and War & Peace (or was it [Anna Karenina?), and I think I read about 20 of the M&Bs before finally cracking. Lived below some satanists. The dog was v old and smelly. I used to cook potato soup for myself a lot. Mmm. Once an old woman fed the dog frankfurters on the street as I stood there starving. Not sure that really constitutes a story. Was there more?

I just think War and Peace makes a fine and necessary counterbalance.

yep. 1W&P=20M&B.

Interesting article I read recently on the reflection of changing social mores in Mills & Boon...

http://forbookssake.net/2013/10/16/busting-mills-boon-myth/

Did the M&B and W&P come with the squat, or else how did they work their way into your possession? Ditto the dog? There are elements of your story which I feel could use some more details of explanation. Or maybe it's better just to think of it as a condition which arose in media res and not ask questions.

I am fast approaching the bit of GEB where I gave up last time. Part of the problem is the sheer unwieldiness of the thing. There really is no reason that it should have taken 270 pages to (spoilers!) prove why MU is not a theorem of the MIU system and why it's impossible to prove that without stepping outside the MIU system itself. Except for the fact that he does try to explain each step of the logic in 3 and often 4 different ways - a Bach bit (and this is the place where I fall down, because I'm just not familiar with the music he's describing) and an Escher print and a little Lewis Carroll story and then the maths. And on one level, that *should* be helpful, because if you don't grasp one metaphor, you might capture one of the others that words out to be your cup-of-tea-in-the-place-of-laws-of-thermodynamics. But mostly it's just this huge unwieldy bulk which has to be waded through to get to the idea of something like "formal systems don't handle paradoxes well, or indeed, at all."

In the preface to the 20th Anniversary edition that I have, he does seem perplexed about how many different people could have thought the book was about so many different things. But doesn't seem to connect that to the fourfold way he went at confusingly explaining it all!

But I have reached the nice, flat plateau where he explains the mapping of signals to symbols, as the equivalent of letters to words-concepts and ants to an ant colony which is a respite of "phew, OK, I understand all this" before he shoots off into gLoops and fLoops and bLoops and speaking of which I'm going back to my book on mountain-climbing and trying not to lick the page every time Macfarlane does something macho and literary. Why do I fall for this. Why. And yet I do.

BB are you a new poster or an old one under a difft. name

i think i bought godelescherbach over ten years ago. i read the first ten pages.

I am a very very very old dawn-of-time ILX poster who is sensitive about not using their IRL name on the internet any more because: reasons.

hm.

I got Joseph Boyden's The Orenda for Christmas. I really liked his first two novels, and I get a lot out of contemporary postcolonial stuff. Living where I live in Canada (white-white-whitesville), Native issues and history are basically never even thought about, let alone discussed.

Finished Kaputt. Fascinating and horrifying in roughly equal measure. Burned through the latest Fred Vargas translation which is as silly and charming as all her other policiers.

Currently reading Mawrdew Czgowchwz by James McCourt and thoroughly enjoying it.

re: that Perloff article is terrific! Read a v rub translation of Duino Elegies, the bits quoted in that article seem a lot better.

reading Leskov and W Benjamin over Christmas, but want to write at greater length on those later maybe.

Interesting how WB is interested in Leskov and that the guy is sorta an ignored Russian isn't he?

Anyway..

Finished Mountains of the Mind, supposed to move onto Robert Graves' The White Goddess (I read this when a teenager, and remember none of it) but feeling too distracted by grief to see the words as anything except lines on paper.

Maybe not the best thing to read in the circumstances, whatever they may be.

*stanza XI

Also, the sublime heights of rhetoric in the earlier parts of the poem—"Veiled glory of this lampless Universe!" is a particular favorite, along with "I weep vain tears; blood would less bitter be, / Yet poured forth gladlier, could it profit thee"

taylor branch's parting the waters, the most dramatic book about organizing i'd read since trotsky's history of the revolution, interwoven w some great game-of-thronesy stuff w/ rfk + j.edgar. def moving on to pillar of fire after a hiatus.

david nasaw's the patriarch abt joe kennedy sr.: this was ok. lotta stuff about how the kids are doing at school. british ambassadorship stuff the most interesting, predictably. he had the financier's overriding fear of war. usually a pretty sound prejudice.

also i finally restarted and finished the stand (1978 ed.). the first 400 pages took me 12 hours and the remaining 400 took me a month and a half, so that's my review.

reading peter nichols, modernisms: a literary guide. had never been able to get much from it before, guess i'm in a different place now, but it's still kind of tiring/funny how mechanically he brings out heavy deconstructive guns to tease out aporias in everything he talks about, transparently so but without saying that that's what he is doing. fair enough i guess given how much basis for it there is in what deconstruction actually was actually working with in baudelaire, the symbolists, etc.

Stone, Einstein and the Quantum
Kragh, Niels Bohr and the Quantum Atom

Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling
recommended on another thread, amazing

I revere Perry Anderson as perhaps the greatest writer of non-fictional prose in English and am always saying so and never do I find anyone else that likes him.

I know Peter Nicholls, he is actually very nice and generous, but that book can indeed be quite thorny to read. It's tremendously learned but maybe the literary material was difficult enough without theory making it harder.

i knew you would know him, that's why i posted! i'm actually reading it to find out about modernism, not about literature. but embedding all the readings in a deconstructive framework does make the theory i am getting kind of ~performative~. could do with a fair bit more telling, little less showing. but the story i'm getting is eerily close to some of the concerns i brought to the book anyway, so i can tolerate being lectured at.

I have no interest in cutting off conversation, but we've got two reading threads going at once. Can we use the 2014 onee?

"i'm actually reading it to find out about modernism, not about literature"

what kind of modernism? non-literary modernism?

no, mostly the literary kind, but as modernism, as such. i've been reading about it ever since i was a wee student but still can't really employ the concepts for myself. 'all the CONVENTIONS were EXHAUSTED!' that kinda thing.

sorry al i just used what were in fronta me. it even says winter! i assure you this what i got here is winter.

re: anderson - writing 15000 words on Cyprus proved to be a good idea.

Because it was interesting?

I can't say, that was the one PA LRB essay I could not bring myself to read. I skimmed it and still could not find any point of purchase.

Well at the time you'd think it was...an odd idea. I read those series of articles on Italy, France, Russia and Turkey one after the other over a week at work (it was a very quiet week in August).

Two years later that area became entangled with survival of the eurozone, so it suddenly turned out to be one of his most important pieces for the LRB - or at least it felt like it/you could see a point to it.

Last night I finished Old Money and picked up Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin. Tonight will be the acid test to see if I stick with Baldwin or try something else. I still have Savage Detectives staring at me from my shelf of to-read books, so Baldwin has strong competition.

For what it's worth, the second of Go Tell it on the Mountain's three parts ("Prayers of the Saints") is probably the strongest, so it may be worth staying with it at least that far.

It's obviously your call and your reading time, though.

Baldwin's not a good novelist, I've learned.

As a novelist, he's a great essayist, I think.

better than great. There aren't any adjectives.

i was reading 'the specter of alexander wolf' but it got old real quick

yeah, it's brief tho. I'm not sure it's entirely without merit. feel undecided on it. decide me. it's certainly not great.

I think I'll go ahead with Go Tell it on the Mountain. It is constructed to maximize the melodrama of the story, but it has other redeeming qualities of dialogue, setting and observation. Baldwin had a good ear and eye.

Currently reading Stung! by Lisa-ann Gershwin about how jellyfish are taking over the world. It's terrifying.

haha f. i remembered you being decidedly pro! that was why i bought it! that and the paperback of the infatuations didn't cost enough, alone, for amazon to post it free of charge

xp

god I don't think I could read that - the LRB review of it made me really really tense.

Reading the recent Leo Damrosch biog of Swift - it's fine to good - I just enjoy reading about Swift tbh.

boo. i really dug Alexander Wolf. Oh well

> Interested to hear what S is like. The idea of it is cool, but I am no Abrams fan, so have not read it.

it's a nice thing, the actual object. story doesn't hold up, i don't think. the actual story is a bit slight - pirates, assassins etc, not the literary classic the margin people seem to make it out to be. but then it is probably just designed to have the other story hanging off it. then the marginalia story has holes in it. plus there are several layers of that from different times and often you are reading about fallout from things that hasn't happened yet (and sometimes happens off page). but fascinating idea, often slightly confusing and the book itself is quite beautiful. (am going back to read just the marginalia, see if it improves)

(also, i think the plan is to reveal bits of it over the next year, web related bits. will have to keep an eye out)

> Just finished A True Novel by Minae Mizumura

ha, this caught my eye recently. glad to hear it's good.

i didn't realise s. was so danielewskish

re alexander wolf i went off it when it had that phase of being About Women. the boxing match was exciting. the ending was weirdly foreshorted, given how predictable the ending was.

i saw it coming from the halfway point and yet it seemed like arrived too quickly, i guess, is my claim

made a note at the time of reading, which doesn't make entire sense to me now:

"the final event seems v cursory but it does not matter - it is the only real outcome of the novel and therefore it does not really matter how this is accomplished. it is in one way a happy ending - in two ways in fact - but rather than liberating them both from wolf, it perhaps only confirms his view of metaphysics of existence. their world now exists within the narrow conception that rah narrator has rejected. or perhaps they have freed themselves from the foreknowing that Wolf embodies."

i suppose i'd try and gloss it this way: if i remember, the book starts with a bifurcation (between wolf and the narrator), the separation, meeting and inevitable closure of which will clearly form the narrative of the novel.

the novel itself has four or five pulses of action interspersed with fairly long periods of self-philosophising. I'm not sure it does it any worse than plenty of other novels, but it is stuff many people will have come across before in Notes from the Underground, Kafka and Camus. As I say, I'm not sure there's any reason to suppose it's doing this sort of thing any worse than other books in a similar vein, but it possibly suffers slightly in this respect from being a 'lost' classic (a publisher's phrase after all, probably really only meaning, 'less well known than some other writers from a similar period or in a similar vein.')

The pulses go something like this:

1. Initial scene and murder - determines the cast of the life and action of the novel
2. Discovery of Alexander Wolf - the problem to be resolved
3. Boxing match and affair - the thing which is worth defending, the nature and philosophy of the narrator: why the problem matters.
4. Meeting, and deaths - the nature of the thing that haunts the narrator - the anti-philosophy - the confrontation between the two and conclusion

i can't remember the details of the philosophy and anti-philosophy, but seem to recall that Wolf espouses a sort of fatalistic determinism, which the narrator resists (he has something worth fighting for and defending in his love), but that the closure of the bifurcation produces an irony where the narrator is victorious, but has ended up fulfilling his spectre's understanding of the cosmos. (I'm not sure about this)

I was interested to see how much i could separate out the matter that would have appealed to me as a teenager (white jerk writing, insufficiently realised ego) from merits the novel had outside of that. Can't remember where I got, though did think a) the boxing match and b) the 'happy' ending were distinctive.

I was curious about certain non-stylistic parallels with another emigre Russian writier, Nabokov, as in certain aspects (rather through a glass darkly than in specifics) they mirror each other. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is both an obvious and a too obvious comparison.

another novel i dislike!! i made an okay poem out of the marginalia someone had left in my copy though

Reading the recent Leo Damrosch biog of Swift - it's fine to good - I just enjoy reading about Swift tbh.

revising my opinion of this downward. I like his cheerful embrace of biographical speculation – Stella was William Temple's daughter! And Swift was his half-brother! – but he's a bit shy of the works. He almost seems to be warning people off Tale of a Tub.

Marina Tsvetava - A Captive Spirit. Halfway through, like her poetry its a hurricane howl for a lot of the time. Things are named and said a lot quicker although I think this could've been more tightly selected. Curently reading a piece on her father and its just 'nicely written'. Porbably meant as a break (coming as it does in the middle of the book) but it ends up disrupting the flow-of-blood prose coming from the other pieces on her poets and friends.

I finished Go Tell It on the Mountain last night. I think it ran true to the psychology of Pentecostalism and Baldwin did a good job of explaining the extreme drama and excitement involved in fighting Satan from minute to minute, while serving a vertiginously all-powerful God who would send you to a pit of everlasting fire without hesitation if you fail him for even one moment, or redeem your soul to everlasting glory on a whim. It also was helpful for understanding how, when your life is already a living hell of poverty, racism and violence, such a religion makes good self-consistent sense.

As noted above, the plot is hella melodramatic, but the compressed melodrama of it helped to make Baldwin's point about how life looked from within that Pentecostal worldview. It's a very theatrical sect.

Last night I picked up Savage Detectives. It is a cliché to call a sense of humor "wicked", but Bolano's satire so far is more of a dissecting knife that he wields with a certain measure of cruelty. He seems bitterly disappointed in his characters and humanity in general, and he has been systematically flensing them.

Totally. I think you and I agreed about Bolano's hopelessness on another thread but maybe I'm misremembering. 2666 is definitely some kind of masterpiece but its emotional hollowness is even harder to take than its graphic violence, and makes me want to resist the novel, or refute it somehow, especially because it so clearly aspires to be something like the "last novel", a statement on humanity at its breaking point. That book was a very memorable reading experience because it was so antagonistic but I'm not sure if or when I'll go in for more Bolano.

I need to read a book for review but am putting it off by reading Shelley and ilxing. What can I do?

What can I do?

Leave the house for another location, taking with you only the book you're supposed to review. Give yourself a good shot at reading it consecutively. If the book is impenetrable or offputting to the point you can't actually read it, then give yourself permission to start dipping and skimming, as you mentally start to form your review, explaining your take on it.

I often write reviews switching from Word document to ILX.

I don't think you can take those hard and fast conclusions from 2666. It resists such things.

Some of us were arguing, or just differing, about this on the Bolano thread, but I didn't take 2666 as hollow, which is why I feel the urge to rush to its author's defense, as if he needed or could be aware of it. He's antagonistic to death, deadly assholes and inverted ones too---he wants us to get mad, not sad, or get both, anyway, when appropriate, which is always, when it comes to deadly assholes--until it's time to become coldly observant, tracking then, doing a body count of their victims, when/as if that all counts for something. All those writers in exile---sometimes with silence, cunning, mobility, sometimes just in exile, but always at least a residual magnetism, affecting the other characters going about their various pursuits, benign and malignant---and the old African-American behind the stage mic, the occult Mexican lady on TV, the upper class progressive female Mexican legislator speaking to a private detective: these three testifying, as the author is testifying, and all of his characters, including the murderers, who may or may not all be offstage, all raging in the cage of history and mortality, the story that goes on without us, never getting to the punchline, to the goddam point (ok, that's antagonistic too, but not hollow, except the way we all get hollowed out in time--but I think he was still ahead by a nose, while finishing this book).

Also it's pretty entertaining.

It does feel very consciously like a LAST novel from a career, though.

Having had vile gastro and been feeling unlike myself for several days (I didn't read a book for 4 days, which is like me not breathing), am getting back into the swing of things with Shirley Jackson's 'The Sundial': weird black comedy of manners about people holed up together in a mansion, waiting out a possible apocalypse.

It is lengthy but so is Savage Detectives. Do like that it doesn't feel like a big statement: its such a non-ending.

Never feels like an epic either, one of the sections is about literary critics. Its just an odd book.

2666 was a better book, attenuations and all, than The Savage Detectives.

Just finishing up All Quiet on the Western Front. Pretty boring, to be honest. Usually I like the classics, but this one has way too much philosophizing for my taste. I wonder if this one is a victim of its own cliché, as I love later somewhat similar books like Catch 22, Farewell to Arms, etc.

2666 is a much better book than Savage Detectives and just to make sure there is no ambiguity in my prev post it is in 2666 that I find no whiff of a big statement.

I really enjoyed "All Quiet on the Western Front" and I don't remember it being laden with philosophizing - maybe towards the end. I liked the parts that were just about life at the front - showing how life goes on even in the most hellish absurd circumstances.

All Quiet... is on the long list of novels that inspired movies I love and which I should therefore read one day, but as the qualities that I appreciate about the movie are largely "filmic" ones, I don't know how much interest the source material would hold for me.

y'all can feel free to stop posting here whenever (don't stop reading, though!)